


Plain Vanilla Human Beans

by Sangerin



Category: From the Earth to the Moon, The West Wing
Genre: 40fandoms, Crossover, Friendship, Gen, spacegeekery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-07
Updated: 2008-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:17:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why didn't I contemplate that there might be a Ziegler out there who reached for the heavens?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plain Vanilla Human Beans

I didn't know he had a brother. I didn't know that the Ziegler I'd seen wave at the camera, suited up for a shuttle flight, was related to the Ziegler in the next office. It's not exactly a common name: I might have thought to ask. Perhaps it was because… because Toby is in some ways the least adventurous person I know. He doesn't take flying leaps off cliffs of idealism, because every time he comes close to doing so - and there have been moments - something in him holds him back. Expected failure is safer than unlikely success. He keeps his feet on the ground.

So why didn't I contemplate that there might be a Ziegler out there who reached for the heavens? I'd grown up hearing the stories of the astronauts that my uncle knew so well - seen their faces in his photo albums and on stills taken from his show reels. I barely remembered the program before the Shuttles and Skylab, but Uncle Emmett had lived through it, lived in the midst of Apollo. He'd known the original seven and the new nine and the intakes after that, right up until Apollo was canned, and he was too, because space flight had become boring. There were stories in my memory about Neil and Jim and Buzz and Deke and Gus and Wally, and it wasn't until I was in Junior High that I started to connect those names with who they were to the rest of the world: Armstrong and Lovell and Aldrin and Slayton and Grissom and Shirra.

And when I first heard the President talk about Galileo, the awe and wonder and amazement of sitting on Uncle Em's knee came back, and I started looking up at the moon again at night. But I never even imagined that Toby's brother was in the program. That Toby's brother was heir to the men my uncle had loved, and who I'd idolised. That he'd been in the back-up crew for Challenger; the disaster that everyone had known would happen someday, but had almost begun to believe would not.

I never knew David, and Toby never met my Uncle, but I wish we'd all had that chance - the chance to close the open links between us; the chance for Toby to know the man who made me love that part of history, the chance to me to know an astronaut as a human being. Uncle Emmett knew that these guys were human: he told me that again and again. But for those of us who were too young, and everyone who only ever saw it on television, I'm not sure an astronaut is ever anything but a superhero.


End file.
